


Elephants

by captainofthegreenpeas



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Affection, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Heavensdew, Height Differences, References to Torture, UST, don't think i won't fill up this ship tag by myself just watch me, i will sail this ship solo if i have to, references to violence, writing together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-01
Updated: 2018-03-01
Packaged: 2019-03-25 17:16:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13839378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainofthegreenpeas/pseuds/captainofthegreenpeas
Summary: Plutarch is trying to write his history book. Fulvia joins him.





	Elephants

He ran out of ink halfway through his sentence.

  
“Of course,” Plutarch grumbled, reaching for the inkwell. Sitting it on his notebook, silently begging it not to tip, he refilled his pen. Scattered before him on the kitchen table, like the debris of an explosion of ideas, were his notes, his books, pencils, maps, portraits, forming a lake around the candle which rose like a lighthouse-which he was careful to keep out of falling distance of his thin leaves of paper.

  
Plutarch had not felt joy for many years, but this was a close enough substitute. A hot water bottle cupped his feet at the instep, the heat softening and melting the weary pain of a long day’s standing.

  
He finished his sentence and reached to take a draught of mulled wine when Wagner came booming through the house.

  
“Fulvia!” He called upstairs.

  
“SO SORRY!” She called back, twice as loud as the music. “I’LL BE QUIETER IN FUTURE!” Fulvia and her German opera. “I can’t understand a word,” she had confessed to him once, “but I do love the way they sing it.”

 

  
The music stopped.

 

  
“By all means continue, I’m just trying to work,” he called.

 

On the bright side, she was making herself at home; and he felt quite flattered by that. The presence of another person in the house did make a difference even if they were in separate rooms with separate occupations. The mood was warmer, more contented. Almost domestic.

  
Plutarch finally took his draught. He picked up his pen again when a lilting strain drifted down the stairs.

  
“Oranges and lemons, dada da dum da dada…” Fulvia hummed to herself as she walked down the steps into the kitchen and padded across to take a seat at his side, careful not to slip on the flagstones. Her hair was unlocked from the grip of its pins and a flighty strand brushed his shoulder ever so slightly as she sat down. He made himself ignore it.

  
“The wordsmith at his forge,” she remarked. “What are you hammering? I thought I might assist with the bellows.”

  
“Hot air was never your style.”

  
“True, but I still consider myself a champion at bellowing.”

  
“That I do not refute.” For a woman whose head was not quite level with his shoulder, Fulvia did have enormous lungs.

  
She surveyed the table. “Is this stuff for next year’s games? Already? It can’t be.”

 

The pages of complete paragraphs were too well kept, the handwriting showed too much care for any of this to possibly be Plutarch’s gamemaking work. Plutarch, she had discovered, deliberately practiced mediocrity in gamemaking in order to avoid being either fired or promoted to Head Gamemaker. He was careful to be competent enough to avoid mistakes that would land him in hot water, but he never proposed anything brilliant enough to mark him out as Head Gamemaker material and paint a target for his rivals to hit. He had gained a reputation- but as one of experience, not natural talent. That modus operandi had seen him through over twenty games, when most successful Gamemakers lasted ten.

  
“Certainly not.” Plutarch sounded affronted. 

  
 _Then it must be stuff for the revolution_ , she assumed. It was her turn to feel affronted, for not being consulted on any of this. True, he did not always take her advice, but he never had the indecency to deny her the opportunity to sound her opinion.

  
But on closer examination, it was something else entirely.

  
“You planning a book?”

  
“An essay. ‘A Comparison Between The Characters and Politics of Domitian, Caesar of the Roman Empire and Gnaeus Kinnear, President of Panem.’”

  
“Can I have a read?”

  
He rifled through a pile of sheets and handed her a finished passage. Without another word she started reading. Almost immediately she slowed her pace. Each clause, she realised, was to be savoured. Each word had its place in the creation of the sentence as a whole, like a jewel in its setting. The writing was ostentatious, but that was its charm. Some parts were even amusing, yet it was never too informal. The language was rich and she was sorely tempted to read aloud, to taste the ideas on her tongue and give them voice.   
Plutarch watched her closely. For some reason, he had a brief surge of hope that she would like it. He wanted to tell her more of his other work- now that she knew about this one she may as well know about all the others, but might that sound a little over eager?

  
“Do you have a publisher?” She frowned. If he had, she’d have thought he would have told her.

  
“Keep reading.”

  
“Ah.” Fulvia’s eyes widened as they travelled across the words that provided evidence for why the answer to that question was no. No one could dare to publish what he had just written. As she was drawn deeper in, the impact of what she was reading chased her breath which quickened, Fulvia brought the page closer to her face as if to scrutinise every scratching that the pen had made. Tremors crept into her fingers until she flung the page- not carelessly or with anger- on the table. Now that her face was no longer hidden he could see that it was blanched, with a tinge that in daylight would be called green.

  
“Where did you find that information?” She whispered. Not first hand- although both of them had witnessed Capitol atrocities first hand, neither had been born when Kinnear died. Plutarch looked down at the table. Fulvia didn’t know whether to run, to run as fast as possible, to run as if the horror she had just read was chasing her- or to stay.

  
He made as if to speak, but stopped himself.  Why not? He thought. Better her knowing than anyone else.

  
“I wasn’t around when any of it happened. But my parents would talk- I can’t remember when I first started doing it, but they would say goodnight and send me off to bed and I’d go off up the stairs and crouch by the banisters on the landing. They constantly left the door of the living room open, so even though they kept quiet I could hear what they were saying. If they’d have only talked normally I’d have ignored it, but they stopped sounding like my parents when they were afraid.

 

"They heard things at work, during the day, rumours they could never speak of with anyone but each other, alone at home. Never short of details, believe me. It would drive them to tears. There was nothing they could do but be afraid. I didn’t always understand what they were saying, only that it terrified both of them, so I had to look up for myself the meaning of words like rape, extortion, gaslighting, scaphism, abacination, denailing, waterboarding, scalping, impaling, flaying, molestation, brainwashing, lynching.

 

"I couldn’t stop myself from knowing about it. Forgetting wouldn’t make it go away. It used to give me nightmares. I lied to their faces, every time, told them it was ghosts, or skeletons, or mutts, or monsters under the bed. It never was. I never told them, ever, what I’d heard, I thought they’d be angry with me and stop me from listening. If they had, I’d only get more scared thinking about what it could be that I wasn’t hearing.”

Fulvia searched for something to say. She felt sure she would have to say something or risk being sick right then and there.

  
“So you heard all that… and decided that gamemaking was a good idea?”

She knew it was not a kind thing to say, but they both knew courtesies and bland sympathies wouldn’t change anything. What she wanted to tell him was beyond her reach. She didn’t feel ready to share that just yet.

  
Finally, finally, he looked back at her. “I needed to see things for myself. The system, from the inside. I knew I had to understand it, how it worked, what it was for, or else go mad. I wanted to keep the dangers where I could see them. Like you, I have only my wits to keep me from total oblivion. I had one focus: my own survival. Until of course, I found my alternative.”

  
He buried his face in his hands. “So many children, over the years. You learn to take each death as it comes, rather than pile them up. The smartest ones are the hardest to see die. So much potential, spent on entertainment. You can’t stop wondering what they would have done, what they would have given us, what they would have created. None of them deserve to die, of course, even the clotheads. But the bright ones… their imaginations, their creativity, their perception, their brilliance…”

  
“And this…” Fulvia looked around. “Is this… atonement?”

  
Plutarch thought on that. “No,” he admitted. “But it feels nice. To be creative rather than destructive, for a change. To create something of some value. To honour a discipline that I love with my labours. Nobody will ever read it, any of it, but that doesn’t matter so much. It is enough, to write.”

  
“Could I help you with it?”

  
He blinked. “Help me?”

  
“Not for money. But help you create it. If you need me to proofread it, or I could do some research for you. Help you.”

  
Fulvia tried to inject some lightness into her voice. “You know what this needs?” She picked up the page and tapped the margins. “Illustrations. You could be the first historian to be illustrated with stick men.”

  
“Stick men?” The idea was so bizarre Plutarch was laughing in spite of himself.

  
“And elephants. For some reason I can draw elephants really well and nothing else. I don’t know why this should be so, but it just is.”

“I’ll think about the stick men, but save the elephants for Hannibal crossing the Alps. There are no elephants in this section of history.”

  
“Well, maybe it could be symbolic.”

  
“Symbolic of what?!” Plutarch was gradually returning to his usual self.

  
“You could colour code them. Red elephants for a battle, purple elephants for a shift in the power balance, green elephants for contrast… or maybe they could be chasing the stick men through the margins. Good books need plot twists; and the problem with history is everyone knows what’s going to happen in it. What better plot twist than a random elephant showing up in the middle of a paragraph on crop harvests?”

  
“'And now for something completely different’” Plutarch quoted.

  
“Where else could we sneak in elephants?” Fulvia mused. “What else have you written?”

  
“Let me see… I have a brief history on the sonnet, which in a fit of lunacy or brilliance I decided to write in sonnet format, resulting in me spending all winter counting iambs. There’s my work on post-apocalyptic inflation… which was twice as time-consuming to write when I finished it than when I started. I did another comparative essay, on the similarities between the Capitol now and the United States of America during the period they called the Roaring Twenties- I enjoyed that one. One on the question "Was the government of Cassius Crane, President of Panem, an utter disaster?” to which my answer is: “That’s an understatement if ever there was one”. All in all, I have seven pieces. This is my eighth.“

  
Fulvia nodded slowly. "Do write a history of our current times one day,” she said, jokingly putting on an air of mock vanity. “And when you come to, obviously, describe how incredibly beautiful I was, don’t worry about being longwinded. Brevity can have an exception every now and then.”

  
“I’ll keep that in mind, I promise.” Plutarch replied.


End file.
